Chapter 9 So Cute, I Could Eat You Up #2
Yua gestures to one of the glass displays down the hall.
“Well, there are some recipes over here. Once you’ve reeled the silk, all that’s left are the perfect little crunchy silkworms to eat.
Add some sauce, and it basically tastes like earthy shrimp, but with a savory marinade.
If anything, not eating them afterward would be wasteful.
And the textile industry is already so wasteful as it is. ”
There’s that heaviness to her voice again. Like she could say more, but won’t.
Instead of lingering on the topic, Yua gives me a personal tour of the museum.
We start at the life cycle of the little silkworms, and Yua tells me all about their exclusive mulberry leaf diet.
After about a month of munching, they’re ready to spin their cocoons.
From there, the threads of silk are extracted onto a reel.
The individual threads are combined to create stronger threads of silk.
And then the threads are woven together to create fabric.
“Want to weave some silk?” Yua asks as we near the end of the tour.
I gape at her. “We can really do that?”
Yua pulls out her phone to check the time. “If we hurry. The tour bus leaves in an hour.”
I follow Yua to another building. As we walk, Yua points to the fields surrounding the parking lot.
Domes of tarp loop over the mulberry trees growing underneath, keeping them warm in the winters and shaded in the summers.
Every now and then, I spot an employee walking out of the fields with crates of cut mulberry leaves, ready to feed the silkworms. According to Yua, they live in a nursery on the other side of the property.
It’s closed off to the public for contamination reasons. Even Yua doesn’t have access to it.
We enter another building. This one looks like it was recently built so that it could be the main tourist attraction.
There’s a gift shop near the entrance and a small café a little farther inside.
Yua leads me through the throngs of people, parting the crowd.
But once we reach the back of the building, the crowds have thinned, and it almost looks like we’ve emerged down the hall of a school.
Yua stops at a door with a window carved in the middle. She peeks through the glass and whispers, as if the people inside will hear her. “They hold classes every hour. But sometimes, if the numbers are small, they’ll let people join in the middle of the lesson.”
Yua pulls the door open and gestures for me to enter.
Sure enough, this large space is set up like a class.
But instead of desks lined in rows, traditional wooden silk looms take their place.
There are only three other people in this class right now.
Before I can get a good look at who they are, a petite woman with long dark hair and a face mask comes up to us.
She says something in Japanese. I imagine Yua explains that we’re here to join the class, and then she guides me over to a seat at the loom. When the woman walks away, Yua lowers herself to whisper in my ear again. “I’ll be your translator.”
This time, I don’t pull away when her breath hits my cheek. Instead, I let the shiver race down my arms and hope Yua doesn’t notice.
There’s a man in the middle of the room. He seems to be the instructor. Because he’s going over the foot pedals and the moving pieces of the loom, I imagine the class began not long ago. While Yua translates, I glance around the room and find a face looking back at me.
Aiko.
She waves enthusiastically from her seat at the loom two spaces over.
It isn’t until we make eye contact that it dawns on me.
She dipped again. But when did she sneak off?
Why did she come over here? Was she trailing behind us while we were in the museum?
Wow. I’m a bad friend if I didn’t notice she was missing this entire time.
She was probably off doing her own thing so that I could have a one-on-one experience with Yua.
Freaking Aiko. She won’t let this matchmaking thing go, will she?
Yua walks me through the routine of weaving silk through the loom.
I grab the shuttle—the wooden block with a line of string looped through it.
It acts like a needle as I pull the weft of silk through the weaving line.
Once it’s in place, I clamp down on the pedal and a new weaving line begins.
I slide the wooden shuttle through the line once more, building the sheet of silk one layer at a time.
It’s a hypnotic process that is equal parts tedious and relaxing.
I’m so used to sewing material that using a loom to weave silk together feels more like I’m crocheting a hat than it does making a dress.
But as the minutes roll by, I lose myself in the simplicity of the movements.
Go slow. Be in the moment. Don’t stress about my CIF application or worry about what Mrs. Matsumoto thinks of me.
I’m just here weaving silk, and Yua’s talking me through the steps.
“What do you do with the material once it’s woven?” I ask, pointing to the knots from what I imagine are the results of previous classes.
Yua snorts. “Well, obviously, the quality isn’t good enough to sell.”
I slide the shuttle and weft through the weaving line while waiting for the rest of her response. But Yua remains quiet, so I glance up at her.
She shrugs at me. “Honestly, we throw most of this stuff away. I’m not proud of it, but the purpose of these classes is to teach people about weaving, not produce quality silk.”
I nod along and beat the weft of silk flush against the pattern.
There it is again. That ache in her voice.
And even though the class ends shortly afterward and we meet up with Aiko to hop back on the bus, I haven’t stopped wondering if there might be something I can do about how wasteful the fashion industry is.